Nope, I still don't get it
Mar. 3rd, 2009 06:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamsharkSince it showed up in my house in a red envelope, I decided to try watching "Citizen Kane" again and see if I could figure out why so many people think it's the best movie ever made. I still don't get it. Yes, it is visually stunning and I guess it introduced a lot of technical innovations to modern cinema. That certainly makes it important and worth watching.
But for my money the Best Movie Ever has to have more than technical flash. Like believable characters, or a compelling story, or emotional resonance. I don't see any of those things here. The characters are shallow and their motivations are murky (explain to me again why Kane decides to finish the mean-spirited review started by his former best friend and then... publish it? WTF?).
And as for the Central Mystery of the movie - Mr. Kane is alone in a room behind a closed door when he dies. He utters his famous parting comment, then the snow globe drops out of his hand, slowly bounces to the floor and shatters. And THEN the nurse opens the door and enters the room. So how did anybody know what his last words were? Remember, he's not living in a 50's tract house with hollow core doors. He lives in a castle made out of imported stone and huge slabs of oak, with rooms so gigantic that he and his various wives seem to have trouble hearing each other when they're in the same room. Even if the nurse had her ear pressed to the door it's hard to imagine that she could have heard him talking to himself.
Oh, yeah. "Rosebud" is the name of the sled. Or more likely the name of the company that made the sled. Whatever.
But for my money the Best Movie Ever has to have more than technical flash. Like believable characters, or a compelling story, or emotional resonance. I don't see any of those things here. The characters are shallow and their motivations are murky (explain to me again why Kane decides to finish the mean-spirited review started by his former best friend and then... publish it? WTF?).
And as for the Central Mystery of the movie - Mr. Kane is alone in a room behind a closed door when he dies. He utters his famous parting comment, then the snow globe drops out of his hand, slowly bounces to the floor and shatters. And THEN the nurse opens the door and enters the room. So how did anybody know what his last words were? Remember, he's not living in a 50's tract house with hollow core doors. He lives in a castle made out of imported stone and huge slabs of oak, with rooms so gigantic that he and his various wives seem to have trouble hearing each other when they're in the same room. Even if the nurse had her ear pressed to the door it's hard to imagine that she could have heard him talking to himself.
Oh, yeah. "Rosebud" is the name of the sled. Or more likely the name of the company that made the sled. Whatever.
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Date: 2009-03-04 06:42 am (UTC)As for technical innovations, I feel like they don't make a movie great. Like David says, it's a -significant- movie. Maybe it should be at the top of a Most Innovative Movies list. But if another movie uses the same tricks and more, established over decades, and then adds something extra to it, it's a better movie than Citizen Kane. And that's most movies we've ever heard of. 'Better for its time' doesn't mean 'better'. Really, if I were to get into movie criticism, my list of Greatest Movies would probably be heavily skewed toward modern movies. But then, there'd be a lot of modern movies, like Jurassic Park, Pulp Fiction, and The Blair Witch Project, on my Most Innovative list, too.
For a wildly driven newspaper tycoon, give me Gail Wynand from The Fountainhead any day.